Saints for All Occasions Read online

  A child had no choice but to forgive. And he could be kind in his way. He took them fishing, taught them how to pull a trout from the water with their bare hands. Every summer, he brought them to the Miltown races and gave them each a penny to bet on whichever horse they chose.

  He liked that Theresa was bold. He didn’t discourage her. Only Nora did, trying to teach her how to behave properly, the way their mother would have done. But Theresa and Martin hadn’t known their mother long enough. She didn’t get the time to shape them as she had Nora.

  Before she died, she told Nora that the younger ones were her responsibility. Maybe she only said it so Nora would have something to hold on to. So she wouldn’t feel as lost. But Nora took the job seriously, even though they didn’t mind her most of the time. She wasn’t firm, forceful, like their mother had been. She could never quite convince them of her authority.

  As she grew, Nora feared her father less. She became more like his equal in the house once she started earning. They’d talk over breakfast, about the farm, and the girls at work. Her father laughed easily, recounting the story of some barroom brawl back in his youth. She saw that he was not such a large man at all. He was slight by most standards, his fair hair and eyebrows making him look almost boyish when he grinned. She learned that he was not the same man after a given hour, after he poured himself a whiskey, then a second, then a third. She liked her father best in the morning, when she could be certain of him.

  From the front hall, he turned his head now and said, “Theresa! Where are you? Come on.”

  Nora looked to see her sister standing in the doorway of the bedroom they had shared for seventeen years, since Theresa was born. The bedroom walls were a bright, bright blue. They framed Theresa in the morning light like a portrait of the Virgin. She and Nora had all the same features—the same wide blue eyes and thin lips and brown curls. But Nora thought that somehow they were arranged in a more pleasing manner on Theresa’s face than her own.

  When she was very young and afraid of the dark, Theresa would crawl into Nora’s bed in the night and cling to her. Nora would moan and pretend to shake her off, but in truth she liked the warmth and the comfort. She knew Theresa’s body as well as she knew her own. Better. Nora had bathed her as a girl, brushed the knots from her hair. When Theresa fell, Nora was the one to dab iodine onto her scrapes as she roared the house down.

  “I can’t find it,” Theresa said. “Help me. You know the one. It has a pink silk flower at the brim.”

  “Leave it,” Nora said. “It’s half six.”

  Their father handed them each a bit of money. Theresa slipped hers into her coat pocket and kissed his cheek. Nora thanked him and then put the bill into the toe of his empty boot by the door when he wasn’t looking. He would find it later, and need it. He was always making gestures he shouldn’t be. Offering to buy a round of drinks at Friel’s when they didn’t have enough money for sugar and flour; donating to someone’s charity fund when in fact they needed the charity themselves. Even the hackney was a luxury he couldn’t afford, but there was no other way to get there with the luggage. She had already determined to send the fare back to him on top of whatever else she could manage.

  She had told her brother to watch him, to make sure he was careful. But Martin was only nineteen. Who knew if he had any sense about him?

  The men carried the bags out. Nora and Theresa followed.

  Cedric McGann stood by the car. He was the brother of a girl she had known at school. She had seen him at the dances plenty of times. But still, she felt her cheeks go red when he said, “Morning, Nora.”

  A week ago, she had vowed never to blush again, something she did at the most ridiculous times, moments when any other woman wouldn’t feel in the least bit flummoxed. She blushed when she went into Jones’s market and had to stand at the counter and ask Cyril Jones for the tea. She blushed when Father Donohue looked her in the eye as he placed a Communion wafer on her tongue.

  Charlie had said you could make yourself over in America, leave behind all that you didn’t like. Yet here she was, not yet to the front gate, and already it was clear that Nora was stuck with herself.

  “Hello, Cedric,” Theresa said, a teasing note to her voice as if they had some secret between them, which Nora knew for a fact they did not.

  She was grateful anyway that Theresa had taken his mind off her.

  “What was the final score in the football last night?” her father said.

  “Twelve to two,” Cedric said. “I got knocked about some, but it was worth it.”

  “Thatta boy.”

  Her father’s tone was light, as if Cedric were only here to drive the girls to a dance in Lahinch and home again.

  Nora looked back at the low stone walls separating one farm from the next, cutting a jagged line down the green hills for miles, until the green faded into sea and sky. In the foreground were the barns that sheltered the cows, the donkey, the pigs and hens, animals Theresa had named, though their father told her not to.

  She looked at the stone cottage. They were all born in this house. Their mother had died here. Nora set her eyes on her grandmother’s bedroom window to see if she was peeking out through the yellow curtains for one last look at Theresa, her favorite. Everyone’s favorite. But the curtains were still.

  Nora wished her father would hug her once more, even if it had to be in front of Cedric.

  “Be brave, my girl,” he said instead.

  She knew he said it because she was not brave, not in the least.

  “I will,” Nora said.

  “And look after Theresa,” he told her, instructions that had been given to Nora every day since memory began.

  “I will.”

  On summer mornings from the time they were small, Nora led her brother and sister across the fields and went to the sea with all the other kids in town. There was often a moment when Theresa swam out so far that Nora’s chest tightened, watching, waiting for her head to break through the surface of the water. Just as she began to panic and got to her feet, Theresa emerged, laughing.

  She was the youngest, born without fear. It wasn’t quite right to say that Theresa was bad, though she could be. She was simply the most. The most brave and beautiful and brash and clever. Even the most devout, in her way. As a child, she had memorized the lives of the saints. Now she was a flirt, devoting all the attention she had once given to the martyrs to the boys of Miltown Malbay.

  While Nora went to the Holy Hour each day, Theresa snuck off to go walking with Gareth O’Shaughnessy. Plenty of girls did the same, but only Theresa was bold enough to ride right up to the church gates afterward, perched on the handlebars of Gareth’s bicycle, asking, “Who said the rosary? Come on, tell me quick, before I see Daddy and he asks. I’ll be killed.”

  Whatever age Theresa was, Nora had been there already. Theresa always managed to get more out of things, to do it better somehow. Nora had been a day pupil at the convent school until her father couldn’t afford it any longer. She never got beyond the tenth grade. At fifteen, she went to work at the knitwear factory on the edge of town. Theresa earned a scholarship and graduated with the highest marks. The nuns said teaching was a calling, a vocation of sorts, and Theresa had it. If they had the money, she would be on to Limerick by now for her degree.

  As it was, she had joined Nora at the factory. For years, Nora had worked eight hours a day on her feet at the pressing machine, hot steam rising up into her eyes, her fingertips singed red by the end of the week. She had never considered the job beneath her. She felt lucky to have it, when so many people she knew had no work at all. But she hated to see Theresa there, watching the clock for the ten-minute break like everyone else, sitting in a row of girls at their sewing machines, a ladies’ cardigan or jumper on the table in front of her, something they themselves could never afford, which would be shipped off to Penneys or to Dunnes with all the rest. Old Ben Dunne himself, president of the store, visited the factory to thank them every year. Nora h
ad always thought it was quite an honor. But when he came and she saw him smile at her sister, she thought of how he had no idea of the potential in her. Theresa stayed up late every night reading books lent to her by an old teacher, a nun. This pleased Nora, though she told her to get to sleep, that she’d be exhausted in the morning.

  In the backseat of the car now, Nora reached for her sister’s hand and held it tight without a word, without a glance. They drove the mile into town. She was used to traveling this road on foot, or on her bicycle, dirt puffing in clouds at her ankles, staining the ruffled edges of her white socks.

  Passing by the Rafferty farm, she imagined Charlie’s parents and his brother, sitting down to breakfast. She felt pure spite in her heart, though she would never say so. If it weren’t for their decision, she wouldn’t have to go.

  Nora had expected her life to take a certain path. She and Charlie would be married and live on the farm beside her father’s. She could look in on him and her brother each day. She thought her children would grow up as she had, knowing the names of every wildflower, climbing, three or four of them on a single bicycle, coasting down the hill to Spanish Point.

  Nora told herself to let this be the last of her protestations. She would soon be Charlie’s wife. Though the fact of it felt more impossible than the ocean crossing.

  She had run into an old school friend on a recent Sunday, while walking home from church with her sister. Aoife, newly fat and bouncing a baby on her hip.

  “Soon it will be you, Nora,” she said. “I hope Charlie’s a better father than my George. He’s gone off to wet the baby’s head at the pub every day since he was born.”

  Nora felt sick to her stomach, imagining her first child born in Boston, a place she’d never been. A city full of strangers. Charlie more or less one of them now.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have another before long,” Aoife said, and laughed. “The things they never told us in school.”

  “What did she mean?” Theresa asked after they’d parted.

  “Never mind it,” Nora said. She herself only knew because her best friend, Oona, had explained things, after an older cousin explained them to her. Someday Nora would tell Theresa. When it was time for her to know.

  It was just after seven when they reached town. On Main Street, the pubs and the parish hall and Jones’s grocery were shut, and would be for another hour yet. She had never seen it so empty. Most of the houses scattered around the area were low and built of grey slate. The row of shops on Main Street offered the only color. The butcher’s was a pale yellow. Jones’s was bright green. There were pubs and hotels painted white or gold, light blue or pink.

  Once a month, on a fair day, this road filled with farmers selling cabbages and cows, their voices shouting out a price, an exclamation of disappointment or of victory, depending. The next morning, the street would stink to high heaven, the gutters clogged with manure. The shopkeepers would grumble and you’d think the town would never be put right again. But a day or two later, it looked like nothing had ever happened.

  In the spring, when the bishop came for confirmation, orange bunting was strung from one high window to another across the way, all up and down the road. Classes at school were suspended for weeks so the students could study their catechism. The bishop asked them each three questions. Most children stood before him, sweating, trembling, hoping to get an easy one, praying they knew the answer.

  When Theresa was twelve and her turn came, she stood up straight and confident. She met the bishop’s eye. He asked, “How many sacraments does the church recognize?”

  “Seven,” she said, and went on to deliver them from memory.

  “What happens if you die in a state of mortal sin?”

  Again, the answer came straightaway. “You go to hell,” Theresa said. “But a mortal sin can be forgiven through the sacrament of penance.”

  Nora could see he was impressed.

  For the final question, he asked, “What happens at the sacrifice of the Mass?”

  Theresa said, “The bread and wine are changed into the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus when the priest repeats the words of consecration spoken at the Last Supper. In this way the sacrifice on the cross that Jesus offered on Calvary is made present again so that we can join in offering it to the Father and receive its benefits.”

  “Well done,” the bishop said.

  Afterward, Nora overheard him say to her father, “You’ve got a very bright child there. Are all your others as sharp as that?”

  “Heavens no. We don’t know where she came from.”

  It didn’t hurt Nora to hear him say it. She had lived in her younger sister’s shadow most of her life. She had never much minded it there. Nora scolded Theresa all the time. She grew exasperated by her every day. But if you were shy and quiet, mere proximity to someone so sparkling did something for you. In Theresa’s presence, she became less terrified of everyone and everything. Her sister spoke for her when she was too afraid to speak for herself.

  They reached the intersection at the center of town. If they turned right from here, they would come to the church and the cemetery and onward into twenty miles of farmland. To the left was the national school and then farms beyond, eventually spilling out to the beach.

  Cedric went straight, onto the Flag Road, toward Saint Joseph’s holy well, where Nora’s gran used to dip bits of cloth into the water, hoping they might heal her only daughter.

  Nora closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see the third farmhouse on the left up ahead, the white stucco with red flowers in the window boxes that belonged to her best friend, Oona Coogan.

  Oona Donnelly, now.

  Theresa had loads of friends. Nora had Oona and wouldn’t have traded her for all the rest of them combined. They had spent every day together at the convent school as girls, and at the factory these past six years. Oona was one of nine children, and like Nora, she was the oldest. For years, she had been on and off with Conall Davis, but months ago, without warning, Oona’s father had forced her to marry an old farmer with a good bit of land.

  Oona didn’t meet the man until two days before the wedding. That morning, as her mother rushed around hanging rosary beads from trees and delivering eggs to the Poor Clares to ward off rain, Oona cried bitterly to Nora, up in her bedroom, wearing her white dress. After the wedding, she told Nora how the farmer barely talked to her. He hated Oona’s cooking, her heavy footsteps, the pitch of her voice. She dreaded evenings, when he came in for his tea, and she dreaded what he expected of her after they’d gone to bed.

  “I don’t know how I’ll manage when you leave,” Oona told Nora. “I’ll have nobody.”

  Now Theresa said, “Stop, Cedric. Stop the car.”

  Nora opened her eyes to see Oona standing at the edge of the road. She climbed quickly from the car and they embraced so long and hard that she thought perhaps they’d miss the bus, and then the boat in turn.

  Oona had made them a sweet cake for the journey.

  “I’ll write to you every day,” she said.

  “I’ll do the same,” Nora said.

  As they pulled apart, Oona pressed a note into her hand.

  “For when you get lonesome.”

  Back in the taxi, Nora said a prayer for her friend. It was hideous what Oona’s father had done. Nora supposed her own parents had been a made match, but that was the fashion then. It shouldn’t happen to a girl anymore.

  Then again, maybe her situation wasn’t much different. Charlie was not a bad man. But theirs was no great love story. From an early age, Nora had understood that the farm would go to her brother, that she and Theresa were expected to do their part. To marry, to vanish. There were things that were never discussed. This was why her father would not meet her eye.

  What would there be to remind her now of all that she had known? Her memories were here, ignited by the sight of a specific shop or house or corner.

  Her melancholy led her down a road that ended at her mother. Nora felt
the absence of her, total in some way now.

  She began to cry.

  Theresa said, “Come on, so. We’ll be back before long.”

  Nora wondered if her sister believed it. She tried to picture Miltown Malbay as a bird might see it from above, tried to press every bit of the town into her memory. She supposed Theresa was doing just the opposite: soaking up what was around them right this moment. The scent of Cedric McGann’s cologne and the grumbling engine and the houses up ahead, coming into view.

  —

  The bus to Cobh smelled of herring. A man in the second row had brought it for his lunch, and the odor traveled ten rows back to where she and Theresa sat. Outside the window, the sun shone over vast cliffs as they traversed the coast. In two hours, Nora saw more of Ireland than she had seen in her twenty-one years.

  They came to villages where an electric light shone out through the odd kitchen window. One by one, they were wiring the small towns. Miltown Malbay could have had electricity a year ago, but everyone in a parish had to want it unanimously, and Mrs. Madigan on Church Street had refused to pay. She said her sister in Roscommon had gotten electric lights and now she could tell that her house was full of cobwebs no matter how she cleaned.

  “You’re so quiet,” Theresa said. “Are you thinking about Charlie?”

  From across the aisle, an old woman looked up from her knitting and stared at Nora, awaiting her response.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Liar,” Theresa said.

  “Really. I wasn’t.”

  They exchanged a glance. They laughed. She suspected Theresa knew something about how she felt, though Nora had never told her.

  When she was eighteen, Charlie Rafferty kissed her as they were walking home from a dance. From then on, they were an item. They met for walks down on the beach, and at the dances, though they pretended not to be there just for each other. Nora didn’t fancy him, particularly. Charlie was silly. When they were young, at Christmastime, he ran around with the Wren Boys, going house to house in masks, singing carols, his brother Lawrence on the tin whistle. They wouldn’t leave a person alone until he’d paid. Nora’s father said he’d have whipped any one of his children had they joined in with that bunch.