Ruby Flynn (22 page)

Danny was rubbing down Lord FitzDeane’s horse with a fistful of straw as Ruby walked into the stables.

‘Do you have something for me?’ she said.

Danny grinned. ‘I do. Lord FitzDeane said you were to have my bike for the day. The rest have all taken theirs over to the cottages. I’d have fed it and given it a rub down, if I had known ye was riding it out.’ He grinned again, pleased with himself. ‘Don’t break it now, will ye, I’m away to see me mammy in Bangor Erris tomorrow and I can only go if I have the bike. She loves it that I can get home once a week now instead of twice a year. The bike has made a world of difference it has. Where will ye be for mass, then? Will ye call in somewhere on the way? The church at Bangor Erris is just on the bridge, by the river. You will be there in time, I’m thinking.’

Ruby didn’t answer. She had no intention of spending any of her day in a church.

‘Well, will ye take mass in Bangor Erris?’ A look of alarm had crossed Danny’s face. To miss mass on Sunday was the worst of all crimes.

‘I won’t be going to mass. Are you mad?’ said Ruby, walking over to the stall to stroke the horse’s nose.

Danny looked shocked. As shocked as if she had stripped naked in front of him, as he had so often dreamed that she might.

Ruby placed the palm of her hand over the chestnut mare’s warm muzzle and planted a kiss on the velvet cushioned nose, breathing in the earthy smell of sweet hay and sleepy horse.

‘I shall ask for forgiveness when I attend next week and that, Danny, is the beauty of confession. The priest cannot say no,’ she said as she closed her eyes and inhaled the smell. ‘I will be forgiven and all will be well. Do you know where Doohoma is, Danny?’ she asked, changing the subject. Ruby felt slightly stupid and cross with herself for feeling impatient with Danny.

‘I do. Turn left out of the drive, head for Belmullet and then turn right. It’ll take ye two hours if ye pedal fast. It’s one road in Doohoma, all the way to the head. If ye go any further, ye will drown as the ocean is all there is, all the way to America and that’s where I’ll be heading, one day, when I’m finished here.’

‘America? How will you get there?’ Ruby was genuinely interested. She had no idea Danny had any ambition beyond mucking out Lord FitzDeane’s horses.

‘I don’t know yet, but me brother, he’s there in Chicago and he said when he gets settled he’ll send for me.’

‘Does he write often?’ She pulled strands of hay from the manger and fed them to the horse from her hand.

Danny hooted with laughter, but a troubled look also crossed his face and his cheeks flushed.

‘Write, none of us write, we don’t know how. But he said he would find someone to write a letter for him.’

‘When did you last hear from him, then?’

Danny had wheeled a shiny black bike out of the next loose box and now he looked embarrassed.

‘I haven’t heard from him yet. He’s only been gone a year, but I will, as soon as he is settled.’

Ruby had learned to ride a bike at the convent. They had one with a huge basket on the front, which the girls took in turns to use for errands in the village. Ruby remembered the painful cuts and scratches she collected whilst learning to ride a contraption twice her weight.

She smiled at Danny, sorry now for pressing him to talk about his brother. He needed to hold on to his dreams, his hopes for the future, just as she did herself. His brother was gone and there would be no letter. She knew that. In his heart, Danny knew it too. It would just take some time before acceptance found a place to slip in. Before he could move from speaking of the brother who was waiting for him, to the brother who once was.

‘Thanks Danny, that’s grand,’ she said kindly, as she took the handlebars. ‘I’ll bring you some pebbles back from the beach.’

Ruby tucked her skirt into her knickers, threw one leg over the saddle and was away down the drive as fast as her legs would take her.

Danny’s hands shielded the sun from his eyes and he lifted his cap and grinned as she pedalled furiously away.

Danny was not the only one who watched her as she went. On the first floor of the castle, Charles FitzDeane leaned against the stone mullions of his study window. He took his cigarette case out of his pocket, lit up and watched until Ruby rode out of sight around the corner of the drive.

Ruby whooped as she turned the corner and headed for the gates. She was as free as a bird, until sundown. If anyone had asked her at that moment she would have struggled to explain how she felt. Free was almost too short and inadequate a word to describe her emotion. Overjoyed came close. Overjoyed sat in the basket at the front of the bike and whooped with her as she rode along.

It was the first time, since the storm, that she had been entirely alone, with no one needing, instructing or wanting her. For the first time since she had been rescued from the storm, she had a whole day to herself and no one expected anything of her. She could do exactly as she pleased.

The sun rose in the east and she turned away from the glare, into the west. The smell of the wet pungent earth stung the inside of her nostrils, and she could hear every noise as though it were ten times louder than it actually was. The sound of the squeak on the front wheel as it went round and round, the crunch of the wheels as they met and churned the gravel in the rough road. The birds twittering, the river roaring and even the silence of the bog.

She shouted hello to every man and woman she passed on the roads and stopped whenever she was waved down to be handed a drink by women standing in front of their cottages who saw her ride by. Ruby knew it was the custom to make this gesture to all travellers on the road.

This was not Ruby’s usual life. Today she was someone else. She was simply a girl on a bike out for the day, visiting the place she thought of as home.

The first hour flew by in a haze of joy. There were many conversations with strangers at gates, as they dipped metal cups into a rain barrel and handed her an oat biscuit, each wanting her to stop and give them news of wherever she had come from. They were all desperate for gossip. But Ruby had no time to chat, for long.

She called into the store at Bangor Erris and was directed on her way by the shopkeeper.

‘My sister’s boy works at the inn at Doohoma,’ she shouted after Ruby, puzzled by her urgency. No one rushed anywhere in Mayo.

As she left Bangor Erris, her mood altered. Her feet pushed slower and her heart beat faster. Eventually, she drew up in front of a signpost which told her that she was entering Doohoma. She stared down the single-track road towards the place where she had lived and her family had died. The place she knew would call her back, forever.

A travellers’ wagon, pulled by two piebalds, startled her as they cantered past. Sitting up on the front board was a woman with long grey hair and black teeth. As she passed Ruby, she spat out a plug of chewed tobacco that landed on the floor at Ruby’s feet. Laughing as she cracked the reins and sped by. On the back board sat two boys. One of them threw something at Ruby. It was a stone.

‘Oi, you eejits,’ she shouted, as she felt a sharp pain and then saw the blood dribbling down her leg. She felt tears prickling at the back of her eyes. This was not how she had imagined returning to Doohoma to be.

Taking her handkerchief from her pocket, she spat on it and began dabbing to stem the flow from her shin. This gave her a chance to pull her thoughts together. She knew where the house was and how to get there.

This is it Ruby
, she said to herself,
you are back home girl.

The sun was shining on Doohoma. She could no longer feel the memory of the cold. It had left her, along with the smell and the distress she had once felt. The helpless, crying, lonely, empty uselessness at not being able to do anything to help or save anyone, not even her beloved dog, Max.

The silence was suddenly pierced by the pealing of church bells, signalling the end of mass. People slowly began to file out from the church onto the street.

‘Goodbye, Father.’ ‘Thank you, Father.’ ‘Stop by for a drink and a bite, would you, Father?’

Ruby watched from her secluded spot on the ground behind the post hidden by a long thick tuft of coarse grass and listened while people took their leave of the old priest. The front door of the inn swung back and forth as men left the confessional to worship at the altar of Guinness.

And then she saw a man and a woman with two young boys and she shrank further back into the long grass and the wild ladies’ tresses, growing along the roadside. She recognized him instantly. She remembered the gratitude she’d felt as he carried her inside his coat. She could still feel the warmth of his body and recalled wanting to scream out in thankfulness, to sob with relief that someone was holding her, thawing her ice-cold bones. She could still smell the musty mixture of wet wool and tobacco on his scarf as he carried her down the cliff. The snow, blizzarding against the exposed nape of her neck and his gloved hand, as he pulled his coat up further over her head as though he knew. And she could still see the pity in his eyes, drowning her.

There he was with his wife, pregnant back then, but now clearly the mother of two young boys.

‘Daddy, please you take the ball and kick it for me,’ the little boy shouted, as the older one ran ahead and taunted him by shouting, ‘I’m going to get to the ball before you.’

‘Don’t tease him, CJ,’ shouted Susan. ‘If you kick the ball Con, he will make you play with him all the way back without stopping.’ She laughed and linked her arm through Con’s.

They turned up the hill and there, waiting for them at the end of the church wall, having guarded the ball throughout the mass, was a dog with a coat as grey as iron.

‘Max,’ shouted the elder boy, ‘you are a good dog guarding the ball, isn’t he, Daddy?’

‘Aye he is that. Come on Max, good boy,’ said Con as they progressed up the hill. ‘Let’s be home for dinner now.’

Ruby sat quite still on the verge. She was afraid to move in case her heart broke in two with the effort. The puppy who had slept on her bed when she was a girl, the only other living being who had shared her past. Knew the call of her family, the whistle of her da, the sound of her mother’s laugh and the shouts from her brother. He was feet away from her. Old, with arthritic bones he hobbled up the road and she wanted to run after him and throw her arms around his neck. He was hers. She had thought he might be dead. But Con and his wife had cared for him for the past six years and now she had found him, she couldn’t move. She sat stock still, as their voices faded along with the sound of the boys kicking the leather ball.

Ruby looked around at the sun-drenched road, the epitome of normality on a rare hot day in a coastal Irish village. Wild flowers ran riot and bloomed in the fields, unknowing or uncaring of past tragedy. The ocean breeze was as warm as she had ever known as it brushed against her cheeks. She thought of the winter in ’47. It was impossible to believe that she was now standing almost at the place where her kin had died. Life here today appeared so normal, with children playing and priests running into the pub for the first drink of the day. It was as though the worst tragedy in the world had never occurred.

The congregation had completely dispersed. Ruby felt a gnawing inside her. She was hungry. Straightening the bike, she checked that her lunch was still intact in the basket and then rode through the village without stopping, just as her mother had done so many times before.

She saw the deserted cottage up on the cliff and began to walk towards it. Her heart was beating faster and she knew it was not from the exertion of the uphill walk, but from the anticipation of being in the place she had shared with her family. She would walk on the same turf, retrace her parents’ steps and gaze out on the same view they had on countless occasions. She could feel the weight of that knowledge and of the anticipation weighing her down, slowing her steps.

As she neared the cottage, she held her breath. The door she had opened and closed a thousand times stood in front of her; would it be open? She hesitated as she extended her hand. Someone had fixed a bolt on the door that hadn’t been there before. Had someone else moved in? It was impossible. The place was so obviously deserted. Her heart warmed at the sight of the rain butt and the washing line. These were her things and they made her heart soar with a sense of belonging. She half expected the bolt to be stuck, but with no effort at all it yielded to her hand and the house creaked a welcome as the door swung back on its hinges.

The black void of her past stood before her and she was afraid to step inside. The light from the open door scattered the sleeping shadows from their resting places as they made way for her to enter.

She whispered to herself, ‘Move in, you eejit.’ She needed to hear a real voice cut through the whispers, even if it was only her own. Her voice sounded strange. ‘Hello, I’m back, I’m home,’ she said in a voice, choked with tears and half smiled to herself. Drawing on all her reserves of bravery, she took one step into the house and was immediately swamped by so many long-forgotten memories jostling and competing for her attention, for space in her thoughts. And the noise of the voices, the laughter, the talking, the singing and the reading out loud, they were all there, waiting for someone to open the door and hear them. Ruby could not help herself, she stood on the threshold of her past and listened and watched as they came to life around her and a river of tears flooded her eyes.

As she slowly walked around the single large room, she saw the books that she and her mother had read together were still on the shelf on the wall above the range. They were damp from the ocean air and the lack of warmth in the house and they crumbled a little as she reached up to take them down. She opened one of the books and held it, barely able to read the words for the tears in her eyes. Pages slipped out and fell to the floor and as she bent down to retrieve them, a stamp on the inside cover startled her. Ballyford. The book had the same stamp as those in the castle library. It was there as plain as day. She looked inside the covers of all the other books on the shelf. They were all the same. Each one had once belonged to Ballyford Castle library.