The Walking People (15 page)

Greta could hear by the creak of the floor that Johanna had come up behind her. She looked over at her, but Johanna seemed as thrown off as Greta. The woman was looking back and forth between them. "Is it a bad time?" she asked. "You could direct me somewhere else."

"Not at all," Johanna said finally, moving swiftly across the room to take the woman's bag. "We've plenty of room. Make yourself at home. Pull yourself right up here—Greta, move that chair closer to the fire, will you? Take those shoes off, Missus, if you like. We don't mind. I'll fetch Mr. Breen and he'll—"

"It's Miss, actually, but you can call me Shannon. Named for the river."

"Is there a river Shannon in America?" Greta asked.

Shannon smiled one of those pure white one-hundred-watt American smiles. "No, honey, your river Shannon. Never heard of any other."

In the kitchen, after taking the woman's suitcase upstairs, Greta pulled on her sweater to run out to the stable in search of Mr. Breen.
"Well, for fuck's sake," Johanna said as she took an inventory of what they had in the way of food. "You never know what the day will bring, do you? A Yank in Yank's clothes and a Yank way of talking with a face like the map of Ireland."

And as she ran across the stretch of grass behind the inn, over the patch of gravel, around the derelict barn, down the little hill to the stable where Mr. Breen was working, Greta wondered what kinds of things Shannon carried in her little case.

Supper was chicken, killed by Mr. Breen, cleaned and cooked by Johanna. Shannon went to her room for a rest beforehand, and downstairs, Greta suggested that they bring up tea. Johanna was up to her elbows in blood and feathers. "I'll bring it myself," Mr. Breen said cheerfully, then looked off, as he did when something was occurring to him. "Will I? Or will you bring it, Greta? Will she be indisposed, do you think?"

"The Lord save us, Mr. Breen," Johanna said. "She's already had two cups in front of the fire. I'd say she'll live the next three-quarters of an hour without."

"Right," said Mr. Breen. "Let's leave her in peace then. Lovely. Exactly right."

Shannon didn't want to eat alone, so she asked the three of them to sit with her. Mr. Breen declined, citing unfinished business in the stable, so Greta and Johanna sat and heard all about the place in New York City called Queens and, inside Queens, a place called Woodside. It sounded like a busy place, at least as busy as Galway City, plus a train that ran above the streets that you had to climb a long flight of stairs to board and that brought you straight to Midtown, whatever that was. Straight to the Statue of Liberty, Greta guessed. Shannon didn't seem the least bit like the fussy Yanks Greta had heard about secondhand and thirdhand when she went to Conch on errands and stopped to listen to stories about so-and-so's third cousins who'd come from Boston or Pittsburgh to find their roots. Greta, like most people who'd never met a Yank in person, assumed that all of them complained of the cold or the damp, or said things like there's a spot on my knife, I don't take sugar, I prefer my potatoes mashed, and that kind of thing.

"Are you on your holidays, then?" Johanna asked.

"Not exactly. More like business."

"Business here?"

"In Conch, actually. Do you know it?"

"In Conch?" Greta said, and looked over at Johanna, who ignored her.

"Well, actually, in a little place called Ballyroan. It's a few miles outside of Conch, right on the ocean. About ten miles up the coast from here. That's if the bus driver had it right." She described the place she was talking about, and the strange quality of the whole afternoon was made stranger hearing local words coming out of Shannon's mouth: O'Hara's Bridge, Boreen Thomas, Gavin's creek.

"Pardon?" Greta said again. She stopped herself from kicking Johanna under the table.

"Do you know it?" Shannon asked. She put her fork down and leaned back. "You two should get into poker, you know that? With those faces?"

"What age are you, if you don't mind my asking," Johanna said.

Shannon sat up tall and pretended to be grave, "I am twenty-eight years old. And you?"

Greta watched Johanna consider her answer and could tell by the set of Johanna's mouth that she'd decided on the truth. "Seventeen," Johanna said.

"I'm fifteen," Greta said. "We're sisters."

"And who do you know in Ballyroan?" Johanna asked as she propped her elbows on the table and leaned forward.

"I don't know anyone," Shannon said. She drummed her fingers on the table, pretended for a few seconds that that was as much as she was going to tell. "I can see I'm not going to get away without divulging everything. It's not so interesting. My mother and father were from there, and I was born there, and now my mother has died and she wanted to be buried there. Anyway, so here I am. No, please, it's okay. Really. She was sick for a long time. You know how people say sometimes it's a blessing? Well this was one of those times. The arrangements have been made, and she'll be buried the day after tomorrow."

"I'm sorry," said Johanna, breathless.

Greta stopped herself from asking where they put the dead body on the plane.

 

Lily remembered the O'Clery family well, particularly Shannon's mother, who was expecting Shannon around the same time Lily was expecting Jack. They were one of the first families to leave, and after that the departures kept up at such a heavy rate that at the time, Lily felt she could really miss only the ones who'd left most recently. To miss everyone at once, to look up and down the road at the boarded-up houses nearly swallowed by grass, and to think of every single person who used to live in Ballyroan would be too much.

"What are they to us, Mammy?" Greta wanted to know. "Relations?" Johanna wanted to know too, from the look on her face. Shannon O'Clery must have made an impression. Yes, Lily told them, the O'Clerys were related to the Cahills, just as all of Ballyroan was related, with the exception of Mr. Grady. Not first cousins, of course, not second or third. Not once removed, twice removed, or however the sequence worked. Just related, which meant that their parents and grandparents had lived in the same place and had helped each other.

It was understood between Johanna and Greta from the moment they left the guest to her room and mounted their bicycles to start for home that Shannon would end up staying with them. She had no bicycle, the bus went only twice a week, and those navy blue heels proved that this was not a person who was going to walk ten miles to a funeral. It was a shame, taking Mr. Breen's one and only overnight paying guest away from him, but when the time came, he actually seemed to feel that a burden had been lifted. "Go on," he urged, not knowing Shannon had already accepted the invitation. There was a man in Conch with a Ford, who would come fetch her and drive her out to Ballyroan for a small fee. Mr. Breen arranged it.

The girls arrived at the inn just after dawn, served Shannon breakfast, and sent her off. She was hesitant when she realized they wouldn't be with her, but they assured her that they'd be along later and that their mother had been looking forward to it all the night before.

Lily kept lookout from the front window of the cottage, and when she heard an engine, she made her way up to the coast road so the Ford wouldn't have to turn down the Cahills' narrow lane to be scraped by brambles. Little Tom had already moved his few things to the hay shed, where he'd sleep probably more comfortably than he did in his own stuffy room. The girls would move to his room, and Shannon would take their room, which was the driest and brightest in the cottage.

"Well, welcome home," Lily said as the car door opened, embracing Shannon the moment she stepped out. Shannon returned the embrace and felt in danger of tears for the first time since stepping on the tarmac of Shannon Airport and smelling turf and manure and all the things her mother had told her smelled so good, although Shannon had never believed her. She'd not known where to wait for the coffin, so she stayed by the plane and ignored the drizzle until finally a teenage boy approached to say that they'd received the shipment that had accompanied her and it would arrive in Conch by airline lorry in two days' time.

"The shipment?" Shannon had asked. "You mean my mother?" She had not meant to embarrass the boy.

"Yes," the boy said as his ears grew inflamed. "The body. Your mother."

"Now," Lily said as they made their way up the path, "I wasn't much of a writer, but I thought of your mother often over the years. You're a good girl to bring her home. Did she ever mention me?"

"Oh, yes," Shannon said. It wasn't a lie, exactly. Whenever her mother mentioned Ballyroan, she meant the people there as much as the landscape, and though Shannon couldn't remember her mother mentioning Lily Cahill by name, she did talk about the cottage closest to the ocean, with the river cutting through the back field. It was like an island, in a way, her mother had said, with the ocean in front and the river curving around behind. Shannon smoothed her skirt across her lap and for the second time in two days drew from the local words her parents had braided into their lives in Queens. Words that, oddly, made sense in that crowded place, where everyone, every single day, talked about home, and where home always meant somewhere else.

***

Greta came to two conclusions after sorting through Shannon's bag. First, Shannon would be leaving fairly soon after the funeral. She hadn't brought enough clothes to stay longer, and everyone knew that Yanks wore different clothes every day. The second was that there must be nice shops in Queens. Shannon had a few scarves that felt slippery and cool when Greta reached them at the bottom of her case. She had lipsticks, creams, powders, silk stockings. She had a bag that said
BAMBERGER'S
across the front, and inside that bag Greta found two necklaces, one of round wooden beads painted black, the other a thick silver chain. She had a silver cuff bracelet. She had a clear plastic case that held a pair of black eyelashes—two half-moons next to each other, the same distance apart as real eyes would be, making the box look as if it were sleeping. She had two bottles of nail polish, one clear, one cherry red.

Sitting on her own bed with Shannon's things spread in a half circle around her, Greta listened once more to make sure no one had come back to the house early. She thought she heard a knock at the front door, but she dismissed it. A few seconds later she thought she heard a man call out, but she decided it was her imagination: Little Tom was out driving the cattle from an upper field to a lower field, staying close to the herd in case one of the cows began calving and needed him to wrap his strong arms around the calf's legs and pull it out of her. Lily had announced at breakfast that she was taking Shannon to town to introduce her to people who'd known her parents, and the three younger Cahills had looked up from their bread and butter and tried not to look too surprised. Greta only half believed it until she saw Lily take her change purse from the box over the fire and wrap her shawl around her shoulders. Soon after they left, Johanna had gone down to the ocean for a swim.

Greta began lining Shannon's things up in the order they would reenter the case. The balls of the wood necklace clacked against each other, the glass bottles of the nail polishes clinked. She shouldn't have done it, opened Shannon's case to look at everything, but there it was, and the house was empty, and what harm was it? Shannon had so many pretty things Greta wondered if she'd miss something small. Maybe one of the scarves; she left it to the side. Shannon would think
she took only two from America. She'd think, Did I take all three, or did I leave that royal blue one on my bed at home?

"No!" Greta said out loud, and quickly pushed everything back into the suitcase, including the blue scarf, making a sloppy job of it at first but then willing herself to calm down, go slower, do it right. Shannon was a guest, here for her mother's funeral, and for all Greta knew, she might have saved for months for those scarves. Might have gotten them as a gift from her mother right before she died. Might have borrowed them for the trip and then have to explain herself when she got back to America. Greta shut the suitcase, fastened it, stood it on its side under the window, where she'd found it. As she stepped back, glad she'd come to the right decision, she thought she heard something again. She froze, tried to think of a reason she could give for being in Shannon's room. As she looked around, she noticed that she'd forgotten to return a small hairbrush to the case. She cursed silently and tried to stay still. Yes, there were footsteps along the side of the house, and then the singular sound of the back door brushing against the gritty floor as it was pushed open. Greta waited, listened for a clue that would tell her which one of them had come back, but whoever it was was being very quiet. Just as she began to doubt that she'd heard anything at all, she heard a man's voice again, not Tom's, calling out as if to announce himself. As quietly as she could, Greta reopened Shannon's case, dropped the brush inside, and moved as far away from it as the small room would allow. She opened the bedroom door and slipped into the hall. Just as she was about to call out, hopeful that it was just Johanna back from her swim—ravenous, cold to the bone, moody that the temperature had dropped—but at the same time sure that it was not, she heard the sweep of the door again and footsteps running fast around the side of the house.

Half an hour later, Johanna did come back; she burst through the back door in her damp clothes, her lips blue and trembling. "Guess what?" she said as she pulled off her shoes and socks and dropped her long wool cardigan to the floor. She hung her sopping underwear in front of the stove. She peeled off her skirt, her blouse, her undershirt, until she was completely naked. Greta was not used to seeing her sister's body in the light of the kitchen's north-facing window, and the
sight of the gooseflesh on Johanna's skin made Greta shiver. "We have a Peeping Tom."

"You're making it very easy for him," Greta said.

"Not here. Down at the water. Someone standing there watching me. A man. I only wanted a quick dip but I couldn't get out of the water until I was sure he was well gone." She picked up the afghan from its place on the back of Big Tom's chair and wrapped it around her shoulders. "They haven't come back yet, have they?" she asked. Greta shook her head, rolled her eyes. A little late for that question, now that they would have seen all there was to be seen.