‘I am St Rosa,’ the woman said.
She walked down the slope toward him, and he saw that she was dressed in the same clothes. She came close to him and placed her lips on his.
‘That is holy,’ she whispered.
She moved away. She turned to face him again before she left the orchard, pausing by the gate to the lane.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said, ‘when the moment comes. There is too much fear.’
Milton had the distinct impression that the woman wasn’t alive.
Milton’s sister Hazel wrote every December, folding the pages of the year’s news inside her Christmas card. Two children whom their grandparents had never seen had been born to her in Leicester. Not once since her wedding had Hazel been back to County Armagh.
We drove to Avignon the first day even though it meant being up half the night. The children couldn’t have been better, I think the excitement exhausted them.
On the third Sunday in December the letter was on the mantelpiece of what the household had always called the back room, a room used only on Sundays in winter, when the rest of the year’s stuffiness was disguised by the smoke from a coal fire. Milton’s sister Addy and Herbert Cutcheon were present on the third Sunday in December, and Garfield was visiting for the weekend. Stewart sat on his own Sunday chair, grimacing to himself. Four o’clock tea with sandwiches, apple-pie and cakes, was taken on winter Sundays, a meal otherwise dispensed with.
‘They went travelling to France,’ Mr. Leeson stated flatly, his tone betraying the disappointment he felt concerning his older daughter’s annual holiday.
‘France?’ Narrow-jawed and beaky, head cocked out inquisitively, the Reverend Herbert Cutcheon dutifully imbued his repetition of the word with a note of surprised disdain. It was he who had conducted Hazel’s wedding, who had delivered a private homily to the bride and bridegroom three days before the ceremony, who had said that at any time they could turn to him.
‘See for yourself.’ Mr. Leeson inclined his tanned pate toward the mantelpiece. ‘Have you read Hazel’s letter, Addy?’
Addy said she had, not adding that she’d been envious of the journey to Avignon. Once a year she and Herbert and the children went for a week to Portrush, to a boarding-house with reduced rates for clergy.
‘France,’ her husband repeated. ‘You’d wonder at that.’
‘Aye, you would,’ her father agreed.
Milton’s eyes moved from face to face as each person spoke. There was fatigue in Addy’s prettiness now, a tiredness in the skin even, although she was only twenty-seven. His father’s features were impassive, nothing reflecting the shadow of resentment in his voice. A thought glittered in Herbert Cutcheon’s pale brown eyes and was accompanied by a private nod: Milton guessed he was saying to himself it was his duty to write to Hazel on this matter. The clergyman had written to Hazel before: Milton had heard Addy saying so in the kitchen.
‘I think Hazel explained in the letter,’ Mrs. Leeson put in. ‘They’ll come one of these years,’ she added, although she, more than anyone, knew they wouldn’t. Hazel had washed her hands of the place.
‘Sure, they will,’ Garfield said.
Garfield was drunk. Milton watched him risking his observation, his lips drawn loosely back in a thick smile. Specks of foam lingered on the top of the beer can he held, around the triangular opening. He’d been drinking Heineken all afternoon. Mr. Leeson drank only once a year, on the occasion of the July celebration; Herbert Cutcheon was teetotal. But neither disapproved of Garfield’s tippling when he came back for the weekend, because that was Garfield’s way and if you raised an objection you wouldn’t see him for dust.
Catching Milton’s eye on him, Garfield winked. He was not entirely the reason why Hazel would not return, but he contributed to it. For in Belfast Garfield was more than just a butcher’s assistant. Garfield had a role among the Protestant paramilitaries, being what he himself called a ‘hard-man volunteer’ in an organization intent on avenging the atrocities of the other side. The tit-for-tat murders spawned by that same hard-man mentality, the endless celebration of a glorious past on one side and the picking over of ancient rights on the other, the reluctance to forgive: all this was what Hazel had run away from. ‘Only talk,’ Mrs. Leeson confidently dismissed Garfield’s reports of his activities as, recalling that he had always been a boaster. Mr. Leeson did not comment.
‘Hi!’ Stewart suddenly exclaimed in the back room, the way he often did. ‘Hi! Hi!’ he shouted, his head bent sideways to his shoulder, his mouth flopping open, eyes beginning to roll.
‘Behave yourself, Stewart,’ Mrs. Leeson sternly commanded. ’Stop it now.’
Stewart took no notice. He completed his effort at communication, his fat body becoming awkward on the chair. Then the tension left him and he was quiet. Give Stewart a hug from all of us, Hazel’s letter said.
Addy collected her husband’s cup and her father’s. More tea was poured. Mrs. Leeson cut more cake.
‘Now, pet.’ She broke a slice into portions for Stewart. ‘Good boy now.’
Milton wondered what they’d say if he mentioned the woman in the orchard, if he casually said that on the fourteenth of September, and again on the fifteenth, a woman who called herself St Rosa had appeared to him among the apple trees of the upper orchard. It wouldn’t have been necessary to say he’d dreamed about her also; the dream was just an ordinary thing, a dream he might have had about any woman or girl. ‘Her hair was strange,’ he might have said.
But Milton, who had kept the whole matter to himself, continued to do so. Later that evening, alone in the back room with Garfield, he listened while his brother hinted at his city exploits, which he always did when he’d been drinking. Milton watched the damp lips sloppily opening and closing, the thick smile flashing between statements about punishment meted out and premises raided, youths taken in for questioning, warnings issued. There was always a way to complete the picture, Garfield liked to repeat, and would tell about some Catholic going home in the rain and being given a lift he didn’t want to accept. Disposal completed the picture, you could call it that: you could say he was in the disposal business. When the phone rang in the middle of the night he always knew at once. No different from dealing with the side of a cow, a professional activity. Garfield always stopped before he came to the end of his tales; even when he’d had a few he left things to the imagination.
Every summer Mr. Leeson gave the six-acre field for the July celebration - a loyal honouring, yet again renewed, of King William’s famous victory over Papist James in 1690. Bowler- hatted and sashed, the men assembled there on the twelfth of the month, their drums and flutes echoing over the Leeson lands. At midday there was the long march to the village, Mr. Leeson himself prominent among the marchers. He kept a dark serge suit specially for Sundays and the July celebration, as his father and his grandfather had. Before Garfield had gone to Belfast he’d marched also, the best on the flute for miles around. Milton marched, but didn’t play an instrument because he was tone-deaf.
Men who had not met each other since the celebration last year came to the six-acre field in July. Mr. Leeson’s elderly Uncle Willie came, and Leeson cousins and relatives by marriage. Milton and his friend Billie Carew were among the younger contingent. It pleased Mr. Leeson and the other men of his age that boys made up the numbers, that there was no falling away, new faces every year. The Reverend Cutcheon gave an address before the celebration began.