Carlie shook her head. ‘‘I thought Mom was the only gambler in the family, but the twins gambled that the winning ticket was in the desk and you gambled that it wasn’t.’’
‘‘I never gamble,’’ he told her. ‘‘Except on sure things. There was only one secret compartment in that desk.’’
‘‘But- You mean you tricked them into signing that agreement?’’
‘‘Guilty as charged,’’ he said happily. ‘‘It was for their own good, too. Now they won’t spend the rest of their lives avoiding you because they treated you shabbily. And in all fairness, they weren’t terribly angry with me for getting mixed up about the desk. They put it down to encroaching senility.’’
‘‘You sly old fox.’’ She patted his hand affectionately. ‘‘Thank you. For my inheritance and for my sisters.’’
‘‘Genevieve sent them lottery tickets in their birthday cards. What about you, my dear?’’
Carlie shook her head. ‘‘My birthday’s not till October.’’
‘‘A pity.’’ He reached for the wine bottle and divided the remainder between their two glasses. ‘‘My birthday was last month.’’
‘‘I know,’’ Carlie said sadly. ‘‘The day after Mom’s accident.’’
‘‘When the card came, I was so upset and worried about her that I just stuck it on my desk and never gave it another thought until after the funeral when the twins said that she had started sending lottery tickets in their cards instead of magazine subscriptions.’’
Carlie stared at him, openmouthed. ‘‘You mean-?’’
Her uncle nodded, then lifted his glass with an upward glance to the heavens. ‘‘Your mother was always a winner in my book.’’
Dies Irae by Dorothy Salisbury Davis
BRUTAL MURDER! She could still, at ninety, remember the bold headline in the Hope Valley News, and she could remember listening from the top of the stairs to her mother and father arguing in the kitchen about whether or not they would go to the funeral.
‘‘Margaret, you don’t even know if they’ll hold a wake for him.’’
‘‘Wake or no, they have to bury the man, don’t they? You’ll go alone if you’re going, Tom. I knew he was trouble from the night I first laid eyes on him- a mouth like a soft prune and eyes you’d think were going to roll out of his head…’’
Yes, she could remember the very words, for they were her mother’s and therefore her own.
All three of them, her mother and father and the girl she was then, went to the funeral.
There were people there she didn’t even know, and she had thought she knew everyone in Hopetown. She was her father’s daughter in that; you couldn’t get him away, talking to everyone he met on the street. Her mother would always wait in the car. Her mother’s two cousins, first cousins-she called them Aunt Mary and Aunt Norah-stood next to each other beside the grave but with room enough between them for another grown person. Maybe there was, she had thought, and tried to imagine what Denny would have looked like with half his head blown off.
Father Conway always prayed as though he had a train to catch. Ed McNair, the sheriff, was there, and several deputies. Her father wasn’t wearing his deputy sheriff badge. Donel Rossa was there.
When the gravediggers loosened the straps to lower the coffin, what flashed through her mind was the story her mother once had told her of the man who brought his wife, coffin and all, home to Ireland and buried her on land he claimed was stolen from him. She’d never found out if it was a true story or one of many her mother made up. In time she had asked her Aunt Mary if it was true, for the sisters had come from the same village as her mother on the coast of the Irish Sea.
‘‘She could as well as not have made it up,’’ an answer the very ambiguity of which she had somehow found satisfying. She had discovered you could tell the truth with a lie. That may have been the moment when she first knew she was going to be a writer.
The sisters could barely have been more different from one another. Norah, the older, was thirty-four, tending to fatten as she grew older. She smiled a lot, but it never seemed to mean much, on and off. Mary said if she ever laughed it was under her breath. Mary, having met with a lifetime’s share of troubles, tended at thirty-two to make fun of both her sister’s and her own foibles. Rheumatism was already hacking away at her joints; she was more bone than flesh anyway, and her very blue eyes were sometimes shot red with pain. The devil trying to work his way in, as she put it. Norah was convinced he had already made it.
It was late on a morning of early August heat when Mary saw him come out from the shade of the last elms that arched Main Street. He stopped at the mailbox by Norah’s walk and seemed to study the names. Norah’s was first, Mary’s scratched beneath it as though it was an afterthought, which, in a way, it was. After deciding, perhaps, which of the women it was he saw in the field between house and barn, he came directly to her. He stepped with care to avoid the potatoes she had forked from the ground. He was unshaven, and younger than she had thought at a distance, and for an instant she felt she had seen him before. He was young-old or, better, old-young. His clothes weren’t shabby, but they’d not been in a wash-tub for a while. Nor had he. But his kind was not uncommon on the road, men without work, some wanting it, some not. The grain harvest, then silo-filling, were soon ahead.
‘‘You’re Mary O’Hearn, are you, ma’am?’’
She looked hard at him-something familiar again-and he moistened his lips before saying more.
‘‘You’re welcome to a cup of water there at the pump,’’ Mary said.
The pump with the well beneath it stood a few feet from the faded red building she had converted from barn to the house she lived in. Beyond the pump, and shrouded in rosebushes, was the outhouse she still used. Norah had indoor plumbing.
His eyes shifted from the pump to the outhouse, then back to her. ‘‘Would it trouble you if I asked to use the wee house?’’
It would, but she nodded, and dug the fork into the ground to lean on while she waited for him to go and come back. Cows’ eyes, she thought, dark and murky. If he was Irish, and she felt he was, a Spaniard had got in there somewhere. Black Irish, they called them with his looks at home.
When he came back he asked, ‘‘Don’t you remember the skinny runt of a kid that sang at your wedding? That’s what they used to call me, Skinny-runt.’’
Mary grunted, remembering not the child, but the man beside her with tears in his eyes when she suddenly looked up at him. She could still hear the high, sweet trill of song, but what she had always seen, remembering, was the tears. ‘‘What was it you sang?’’
‘‘The ‘Ave Maria.’ That’s what I always sang, the ‘Ave Maria.’ ’’
‘‘And your name?’’
‘‘Denny. Dennis O’Hearn, the same as yours. It was my father’s brother Michael you were married to, may he rest in peace.’’
There was almost mockery in the sound from her throat. Neither peace nor prayer came easy to her. ‘‘Your voice has dropped a notch or two since then.’’
‘‘I was afraid it wouldn’t ever,’’ he said.
She gave a snort of amusement.
She brought him a cup of tea with bread and jam where he sat on the bench by the door. By then, she was sure, Norah would have a crick in her neck, trying to see what was going on.
‘‘Bring your cup.’’ She led the way into the house through the kitchen and into the room she called her parlor. The house was cool and dark, more walls than windows. She lit the one electric lamp and moved it to where it cast light on the portrait above the couch.