The Whore-Mother (20 page)

“He never wrote a good word in the end room,” she said, and served scrambled eggs. “They killed him. It took him five years to die.” She poured weak tea for McManus. “I nursed him,” she said with peculiar tenderness.

That explained Dr. Sullivan's accusation that she needed an invalid of her own. It was almost funny in a sad sort of way: McManus and Mrs. Burke were being useful to one another. He heard himself say, “You loved Thomas Burke very much.” She ate, her head down. He wondered whether Thomas Burke loved this narrow-faced, cold-faced, severe-faced woman. Was it with her that he learned the explicit things about sex they used to mark in his books and pass around? With her? No. She looked sexless. She was sexless.

“He cried himself to death,” she said, and the phrase sat on his mind like a crow. “They screamed him to his grave. He couldn't think their thoughts or tell their lies. If you love Ireland your own way, it's treason, and if you're the wrong sort of Catholic, you're not an Irishman.”

She cleared away. Her face was bleak.

“I want to thank you, Mrs. Burke,” he said from the rocker and wondered at once why he had chosen this moment to say it.

“None of that,” she said sharply. “Time for another pill.” She gave it to him, with warm milk, and her hand brushed his hair. “You'll be fine, child,” she said, and washed the dishes. She had her invalid.

He felt better by the hour, hungrier, stronger. Dressed, he sat in a canvas chair in the fuchsia-walled garden and re-read the works of Thomas Burke. She fussed him, coddled him, shielded him from the doctor's fears and the sister's moral anxieties; gave him jobs to do, stretching his strength.

She pressed aside the fuchsia bushes to show him the land. Behind the hedge, a field of cut hay, and beyond it a mass of rock that rose four hundred feet, colored orange and mauve and violet and blue and yellow from the lichen and heather and rock flowers and gorse that grew from every crack and pocket of earth on its surface. At its foot were banks of fuchsia, honeysuckle, Michaelmas daisy, hawthorne, and buckey rose. There was a tiny copse of stunted oak. He could smell the honeysuckle across the width of the field, mingled with the scent of sweet new hay. The rock ridges rose beyond into rust and violet mountains and surrounded the house and its little afghan fields. And in front, through the green and crimson hedge, the glittering cove and a wider bay beyond it, and then the sea and a lighthouse, far out on a massive rock.

“That's Fastnet Light,” he said.

“You know it?”

“Your cottage is in Toormore Bay,” he said.

“You know it?”

“We used to take a house for the summer at Goleen, four miles west.”

“You're at home,” she said, and the gentleness in her voice made him look at her. The face was sharp and cold.

The road to Goleen to the west and Schull to the east, and Skibereen, and Cork must be behind the house and beyond the little fields, and beyond the first big ridge. He knew where he was. He was aware of the land again, of the mistress who was stream and hill and meadow and the spread limbs of the derry oak. They would never find him in this moon landscape of rock and gullies and green hollows and fern and thorn forests.

The warm air flowed through the flowering bushes. When she closed the hedge and shut off the moving air, the lawn was an enveloping warm cocoon. He was strong, he was safe. Time was in suspense. The world was very far and irrelevant. He drowsed in the little garden in hypnotic contentment and indolence lay on him like a layer of a dream, and in the evening she gave him his pills and they made him sleep deeply.

How old was she? Forty? Forty-five? Fifty? It varied by the day. He was a mother's boy and the mother cradled his head and put her braless nipple to his hungry mouth. Child, she called him.

Did he dream it in the sleep before sleep? The days slept also. Reality was a welcome distance away. The dream was real.

It was the first time he had wakened in the night. The pills were losing their power.

It was raining. Pouring. The wind was high, coming off the sea, beating the rain against the little, closed, front window. The big back window was open and the cool night air backed in and across the bed like a cool hand.

He was deeply rested, refreshed, life running in him, all his thought on his abundant good feeling. He stretched his legs, reached, and dragged on the head of the bed. It was a glorious feeling to extend a stronger body and feel the life in it.

It was the first rain for several days. The rains he had walked in in his sickness were vague or forgotten. He turned on his side and curled, contented as a cat, and reached his right arm across the wide bed, to sprawl, to sleep again.

Flesh. Warm human flesh. Round human flesh. He was disabled in body and mind and could not withdraw the hand. It was on a hip. She was lying half on her face, her legs stretched at length, the fullness of her hip under his palm. A large, firm, high hip. Slowly, the hand obeyed the head and came back to him.

He lay fearful of the sound of his rasping breath. She was naked in his bed. The sleeping bag on the hard floor must have done for her. Or had she used it? The pills that gave him deep sleep might have given her the chance for some sort of rest? She had to be a sexless middle-aged woman to lie in a man's bed—if she had been doing that? It was hard to believe. “Where do you sleep?” the sister kept asking, and he'd never heard her get an answer. Could a woman sleep beside a man and not ... ? What did he knew about women? “God made you whole, child. Thank Him,” she said to his erection and went on with her washing as if a hard penis was about the same as a piece of garden hose.

If he got up and sat in the rocking chair she'd know he knew. Then he'd have to go and he didn't want to. Was she naked? He reached cautiously for her back. Cloth. Her nightgown was gathered up about her waist. Frigid. A sexless widow in bed with a drugged child.

She always called him child.

Gently, as if the bed was rocking from his careful exertions, he perched his rigid body on the edge of the mattress, his back to her. He was erect again. Her hip was still warm in his hand as if he hadn't withdrawn it. The thought of it murdered him. Forty or fifty, she was a woman and he had never before had his hand on a woman's hip. If he turned in his sleep, hard and burning, he might press it against her and ... by God, he couldn't allow himself even to think about that. He daren't go to sleep again in case....

But he went to sleep again, and woke, still rigid in every limb, and aching in every muscle.

She was not there. There was no bruise on the pillow where her head must have been.

And the day was normal. She looked as severe as she had done all the days before. He began to doubt his senses and his recovery. She mothered him, gave him harder work to do, sent him to bed much later than usual, with his glass of warm milk and his pill.

It was still raining off the sea. He drank his milk by the big open window and shot his pill out into the rain. It would dissolve there just as readily as in his stomach. He wanted to wake in the night. He had been dreaming last night; some sort of relapse? Another sort of shroud?

It rained for three days. He had not been dreaming. There was no relapse. But maybe a new sort of shroud? She was there every night and gone early every morning. Sexless. He learned to sleep on the edge of the bed, his erections, sleeping or waking, pointed away from any cause of offense. And each day she was as she had been before. Kind. Severe.

The day the wind dried the ground she said, “It's time for you to walk beyond the garden. When it's dark....”

They walked in the moonlight out over the little fields and up the narrow road to the first rock ridge. The moon flew in the sky and sailed on the sea. Far dogs bayed like women in childbirth.

“There, child, you're strong,” she said, and he filled his lungs with the turf-scented air and loved the life in his limbs and the shadowed landscape of the mistress with hills like breasts and little fields like a soft, flat belly. How long was it, he asked himself, since he had
seen
her, really
seen
her? All his old emotions for her were alive.

“You're smiling,” Mrs. Burke said. “Are you thinking about somebody?”

“Herself,” he said, and swept his arm across the landscape. The clouds were banked like dark mountain ranges and between them light came from the molten pewter brilliance of the shining sky. “Look at her sky,” he said, “it's like a furnace or an ice field.”

“You're like Thomas Burke,” she said, and laughed and started down the hill, holding his hand like a mother leading home her child. It was an odd, exultant little laugh, as if something had been accomplished. He had never heard her laugh. “Sleep well,” she said in the house.

He went to bed at once.

He was half-wakened, no, less than half-wakened by the flaming delight flooding his body, swimming behind his heavy eyes, and was far down the adamantine road before the caressing fingers that made him moan softly were joined by the whispering voice that said, “God made you whole, child. Thank Him,” and he was turning and still half-asleep and half-demented when the lips touched his and a tongue tip flickered in his mouth like a sugar-coated shock.

By then he was reaching for the woman and she was naked and talking softly and the hard fingers were magically gentle on his raging penis. “There child, there child,” the voice coaxed, “do what you want....” He was blind, the darkness was black, like a wall that shut in life and fire and sent the universe elsewhere about its alien and meaningless business. “It's all right'” the voice that touched his face whispered, “it's all right ... do what you want to do, child,” and there were no words in his mouth, none in his head; only whimpers of tearing passion and delight.

Gently she drew him and lay on her back, guiding his hand to her breasts, and his senses birled in his head. “I'm a country,” she said, “feel my hills,” and he grasped her breasts frantically and felt the hard erect nipples in his palm and took them in his fingertips and pulled his mouth from hers and suckled the nipples like a feeding infant. “Tease them with your teeth,” she said, and what she said he did. She drew his hand to her belly and guided him over it, slowly, down, and “Do what you feel like, child,” she said, left his hand where she wanted it, and “Come onto me,” she coaxed. “Come on and I'll guide you, child,” and her arm drew him onto her, plunging. “That's it, child,” she said. “That's it, do what you want,” and they cried their lust together.

When it was over, he lay on her and she held him hard with her thighs and caressed his hips with the soles of her feet, talking, crooning, whispering, her back still arched, her loins rising and falling gently, arms holding him on her breasts. “There child, there child, wonderful, child ... wonderful, wonderful, wonderful ...” filling him with immense pride, and peace and appetite. He found her mouth. It was like drinking cold spring water, he thought, and couldn't imagine her face, but her body was like a known country.

“Do everything you want, when you want, how you want,” she coaxed.

“I've never done it before,” he said.

“I know, I know, I know ... my wonderful child....”

There was no strangeness in him with her. There was no morning, and no light. She was there under him, teasing him, talking to him as if she had always been there. There was no age; a warm body, a warm voice, fingers like feathers, thighs that embraced him, a woman who whispered “my child” like a mother and made him feel safe beyond fear, and a woman who erupted under him and made his loins roar invincibly.

And insatiably. “I want more,” he said. “I want everything.”

“Everything is here,” she said.

But in the morning everything was not there. Her mark on the pillow was not there. He saw her crossing the garden in the rain, with her egg basket, coming from the hen house in a gray raincoat, Wellington boots on her big feet, one of Thomas Burke's old tweed hats on her head, her face as narrowly severe as a village vigilante's.

And the day was like every other day between them; like the day of a son in his young manhood and a mother in her middle life and not much need for talk between them.

He did his small services, brought turf from the barn, weeded and turned the few flower beds, looked out at the closing circles of rock hills, and tiny fields and the sea that encircled them, and there was nowhere he wanted to be but this place where he was.

Yet in spite of its ordinariness, there was about the day something not believed. “I'm a country. Feel my hills.” Did that plain severe face really say something like that to him in the dark? Could those buttocks under that square flour bag and those breasts that were lost under its flat front really be as he thought he remembered them? In the bedroom he stared at the bed. His northern Jansenist mind knew they had been there and was not quite persuaded; or was not quite willing to believe. In this room? Wallowing between her thighs? Her voice? Her words?
Her?
That one out there? Did a murderer who went back to the scene of the crime really find the event real, solidly reconstructable? Were the battlefields revisited real after the battles? Was there more than one world to live in, and did they do more than cause their separate atmospheres to mingle as they passed? More and more as the day lengthened he thought of the night and his head warmed for the plain woman in the square dress.

Mrs. Burke did all day the things she had to do—washing, cooking, mending, dusting, dropping an odd word, sitting with a cup of strong tea for “a little crack,” and “come to the table, child,” and rocking before the fire when he went to bed. “Good night, child,” she said when he passed her on his way to bed and touched his arm in a motherly gesture. “Sleep well, now,” as if the light of day would be time enough to speak to him again. Did she really remember?