Again Hazel did not respond. ‘God took him for a purpose,’ she imagined Herbert Cutcheon comforting her mother. ‘God has a job for him.’
‘How’s Addy?’
Her sister was naturally distressed also, she was told. The shock was still there, still raw in all of them.
‘That stands to reason.’
They slid into a thin stream of traffic on the motorway, Mr. Leeson not accelerating much. He said:
‘I have to tell you what it was with Milton before we get home.’
‘Was it the Provos? Was Milton involved in some way?’
‘Don’t call them the Provos, Hazel. Don’t give them any kind of title. They’re not worthy of a title.’
‘You have to call them something.’
‘It wasn’t them. There was no reason why it should have been.’
Hazel, who had only been told that her brother had died violently - shot by intruders when he was alone in the house- heard how Milton had insisted he’d received a supernatural visitation from a woman. She heard how he had believed the woman was the ghost of a Catholic saint, how he had gone to the priest for information, how he had begun street-corner preaching.
‘He said things people didn’t like?’ she suggested, ignoring the more incredible aspect of this information.
‘We had to keep him in. I kept him by me when we worked, Garfield wouldn’t address him.’
‘You kept him in?’
‘Poor Milton was away in the head, Hazel. He’d be all right for a while, maybe for weeks, longer even. Then suddenly he’d start about the woman in the orchard. He wanted to travel the six counties preaching about her. He told me that. He wanted to stand up in every town he came to and tell his tale. He brought poor Dudgeon McDavie into it.’
‘What d’you mean, you kept him in ?’
‘We sometimes had to lock his bedroom door. Milton didn’t know what he was doing, girl. We had to get rid of his bicycle, but even so he’d have walked. A couple of times on a Saturday he set off to walk, and myself and Herbert had to get him back.’
‘My God!’
‘You can’t put stuff like that in a letter. You can’t blame anyone for not writing that down for you. Your mother didn’t want to. “What’ve you said to Hazel?” I asked her one time and she said, “Nothing,” so we left it.’
‘Milton went mad and no one told me?’
‘Poor Milton did, Hazel.’
Hazel endeavoured to order the confusion of her thoughts. Pictures formed: of the key turned in the bedroom door; of the household as it had apparently become, her parents’ two remaining children a double burden — Stewart’s mongol blankness, Milton’s gibberish. ‘Milton’s been shot,’ she had said to her husband after the telephone call, shocked that Milton had apparently become involved, as Garfield was, drawn into it no doubt by Garfield. Ever since, that assumption had remained.
They left the motorway, bypassed Craigavon, then again made their way on smaller roads. This is home, Hazel found herself reflecting in that familiar landscape, the reminder seeming alien among thoughts that were less tranquil. Yet in spite of the reason for her visit, in spite of the upsetting muddle of facts she’d been presented with on this journey, she wanted to indulge the moment, to close her eyes and let herself believe that it was a pleasure of some kind to be back where she belonged. Soon they would come to Drumfin, then Anderson’s Crossroads. They would pass the Cuchulainn Inn, and turn before reaching the village. Everything would be familiar then, every house and cottage, trees and gateways, her father’s orchards.
‘Take it easy with your mother,’ he said. ‘She cries a lot.’
‘Who was it shot Milton?’
‘There’s no one has claimed who it was. The main concern’s your mother.’
Hazel didn’t say anything, but when her father began to speak again she interrupted him.
‘What about the police?’
‘Finmoth’s keeping an open mind.’
The car passed the Kissanes’ house, pink and respectable, delphiniums in its small front garden. Next came the ruined cowshed in the middle of Malone’s field, three of its stone walls standing, the fourth tumbled down, its disintegrating roof mellow with rust. Then came the orchards, and the tarred gate through which you could see the stream, steeply below.
Her father turned the car into the yard of the farmhouse. One of the dogs barked, scampering back and forth, wagging his tail as he always did when the car returned.
‘Well, there we are.’ With an effort Mr. Leeson endeavoured to extend a welcome. ‘You’d recognize the old place still!’
In the kitchen her mother embraced her. Her mother had a shrunken look; a hollowness about her eyes, and shallow cheeks that exposed the shape of bones beneath the flesh. A hand grasped at one of Hazel’s and clutched it tightly, as if in a plea for protection. Mr. Leeson carried Hazel’s suitcase upstairs.
‘Sit down.’ With her free hand Hazel pulled a chair out from the table and gently eased her mother toward it. Her brother grinned across the kitchen at her.
‘Oh, Stewart!’
She kissed him, hugging his awkward body. Pimples disfigured his big forehead, his spiky short hair tore uncomfortably at her cheek.
‘We should have seen,’ Mrs. Leeson whispered. ‘We should have known.’
‘You couldn’t. Of course you couldn’t.’
‘He had a dream or something. That’s all he was on about.’
Hazel remembered the dreams she’d had herself at Milton’s age, half-dreams because sometimes she was awake - close your eyes and you could make Mick Jagger smile at you, or hear the music of U2 or The Damage. ‘Paul Hogan had his arms round me,’ Addy giggled once. Then you began going out with someone and everything was different.
‘Yet how would he know about a saint?’ her mother whispered. ‘Where’d he get the name from?’
Hazel didn’t know. It would have come into his head, she said to herself, but didn’t repeat the observation aloud. In spite of what she said, her mother didn’t want to think about it. Maybe it was easier for her mother, too, to believe her son had been away in the head, or maybe it made it worse. You wouldn’t know that, you couldn’t tell from her voice or from her face.
‘Don’t let it weigh on you,’ she begged. ‘Don’t make it worse for yourself.’
Later Addy and Herbert Cutcheon were in the kitchen. Addy made tea and tumbled biscuits on to a plate. Herbert Cutcheon was solemn, Addy subdued. Like her father, Hazel sensed, both of them were worried about her mother. Being worried about her mother was the practical aspect of the grief that was shared, an avenue of escape from it, a distraction that was permitted. Oblivious to all emotion, Stewart reached out for a biscuit with pink marshmallow in it, his squat fingers and bitten nails ugly for an instant against the soft prettiness.
‘He’ll get the best funeral the Church can give him,’ Herbert Cutcheon promised.
Garfield stood a little away from them, with a black tie in place and his shoes black also, not the trainers he normally wore. Looking at him across the open grave, Hazel suddenly knew. In ignorance she had greeted him an hour ago in the farmhouse; they had stood together in the church; she had watched while he stepped forward to bear the coffin. Now, in the bleak churchyard, those images were illuminated differently. The shame had been exorcized, silence silently agreed upon.
‘I will keep my mouth as it were with a bridle,’ Herbert Cutcheon proclaimed, his voice heavy with the churchiness that was discarded as soon as his professional duties ceased, never apparent on a Sunday afternoon in the back room of the farmhouse. ‘Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God.’