George and the Pole stood and watched me leave. They looked as if they were beginning to believe I’d done something bad. I felt I might be better behind bars for a while. I’d have time to think. It would force Sean to get serious, and reassure him that I was being punished for killing his mother, although I was still sure I hadn’t.
I got back again some hours later. The house was crawling with forensics people, plugging the causal breach. I wondered if they’d sort this one out. Why was the cellar locked, and how come Dad had the key? What if Dad was the killer?
Soon they announced that the bodies had been down there for six months.
I did a quick calculation. “That’s when Mom skipped out and Dad lost the plot.”
“One of the bodies is your mother, Mr. Nulty, the other appears to be your Uncle Eddie, from Vancouver. Your mother was shot. We haven’t found the weapon, but the bullet is an old-fashioned one.”
“Sunuvabitch!” said George. “And the uncle?”
The cop ignored him and continued to address me. “Your uncle had his head smashed in by a blunt weapon.”
There was a lot of legal stuff to handle after that. Eddie’s estate was protected by some Canadian legal thing. It looked like no one would get at it for a while, least of all the inheritance-hunters who had set the ball rolling. It also looked as if his remaining brothers and sisters would inherit. The Irish legend of the Canadian uncle would become a reality. The real estate people were slapped down by my lawyer. House and bar were declared private for the receptions and funerals. (I did wonder if the Armenian would consider himself in or out, and then I wondered why he hadn’t showed up lately.)
Sean began to throw his weight in and help with the arrangements.
Noureddine and George got a private investigator to come up with some loose threads: “An out-of-work Yugoslav brute called Niko is throwing money around. Turns out he got it from the Armenian. We’re trying to find out why.”
They got Niko up a dark alley one night. He admitted he’d found the door open and gone for it. He refused to admit anything else.
They called the cops, who found out the Armenian was in some kind of smuggling thing with Russia. The Swamp Rat was either in, or else she never knew about it. No one could figure out what had happened to the money. The Pole had disappeared and was suspected of working for the Armenian, among other things.
It didn’t stop there. George and his pals found someone Niko’d boasted to about knifing my wife. It could never be proved that he’d done it for the Armenian, although the cops suspected this. They also suspected that Eddie had killed my mother, but couldn’t prove that either. Nobody knew why, although she might have had something on him that she tried to use, or threatened to use. No gun was found. They reckoned my father had then killed Eddie, but couldn’t prove that either. He might’ve hid the gun, but then why didn’t he try to hide the bodies too?
“He lawst his mind, remember?” said George.
Naïma slept in the house until I found someone to replace the Pole. We got a clinic to take Dad for a week while the funerals were happening. The heat soared to over 100, and we mopped our brows and showered a lot and drank too much alcohol.
When all the bodies were buried — we did it the same day, same time, three hearses and three coffins had never been seen before except after an accident — Naïma and I went to see my father in the clinic.
“How are things at home?” he asked me. “How is everyone? How’s She?”
I presumed he was talking about the Eternal Feminine, his mother, his wife, his daughter-in-law. Whatever.
“What kind of work are they doin’ on the farm?” he asked.
“That’s a great man for his age,” said an Irish voice from the next bed. They keep ’em in twos so one keeps an eye on the other. Cuts down on staff.
I couldn’t see its owner due to a screen, but recognized it as a Monaghan accent. I wondered if this was an accident, or if someone had actually tried to group them.
“Pray to Saint Theresa, she’ll help you,” the Monaghan voice said.
“She cured Patsy Gibney,” said my father.
“It’s 7 o’clock. Ye’d be doing the milkin’ now,” the voice continued.
“What?”
He repeated it four times before Dad got it.
“Indeed, an’ I wouldn’t,” Dad replied. “I’m finished with all that now. I’m a suckler.”
I tried to explain to Naïma my ideas about the agricultural metaphor outliving its context. She looked at me funny.
As we left, the two men thought they were preparing to dose an uncooperative beast from a bottle.
“Fuck him,” muttered my dad. “Throw it all over him and let it soak in.”
“We’re off now, Dad,” I said.
He eyed me for a moment, then he said: “The divine diarrhea of the dollar.”
I recognized the words of Salvador Dali, and wondered again just how senile my father really was, and if it might strike me too.
But not yet, dear God, not yet. For the moment, me and Naïma were going to make a team. We’d get my dad home and whip Sean into some kind of shape. Rectitude was on the march again.
First Calvary
by Robert Knightly
Blissville
The little girl is playing there by herself. She’s off in a corner of the yard by the alleyway where the girls come out of the Good Shepherd School at 3 o’clock when the bell rings and walk through to the street. But it’s already late, getting dark, time for all little kids to be home with their mothers. Nobody can see her there in the alley, he knows, because he’s been watching her awhile from behind the iron picket fence. She doesn’t see him, nobody sees him. For about the hundredth time, she takes her baby out of the carriage, fixes its clothes, talks to it, and puts it down again. He’s on the move now, out from behind the fence, walking quick on stubby legs down the alley. She can’t see him coming, she’s got her head in the carriage again.
“Be good now, baby,” he hears her say just as he reaches her and she straightens up and sees him. “Oh!” she says.
He pushes her hard and she flops down like a doll on her behind. He’s down the alley, out the gate, onto Greenpoint Avenue almost before she starts bawlin’.
He crosses the avenue, pushing the carriage in front of him fast as he can along the high stone wall between himself and the dead people buried in First Calvary. He dares not look left for fear of the Stone Saints high up on their pedestals standing watch over the graves. Even though he knows they can’t see him because their backs are turned to the street. He knows why this is so because his Nan has told him. Saints give fuck-all for the likes of the shanty Irish, Nan says. As he rolls across Bradley Avenue, he sneaks a look at the front door of the Cork Lounge, where Nan takes him and the dog on Saturday afternoons, after the stores for a growler of Shaeffer “to go.”
The carriage is big as him but he can push it all right. He hurtles past the people sitting on the front stoops of the houses, there like always, the mothers hanging out the windows in their parlors, resting big folded arms on windowsills all up and down the block, watching. He knows this, so he keeps his head down behind the carriage, pushing it up the block fast as he can, up and on his toes, leaning into it like the football team he’s seen practicing in the vacant lots off Review Avenue alongside the Newtown Creek.
Still, he feels the eyes on him, watching. He trips! Hits the pavement on hands and knees. The carriage rolls forward by itself, already two squares of sidewalk ahead, but he’s up! After it! Tears stinging his eyes, he grabs the handlebars, just missing the cars parked at the curb. He rights his ship and sails on up the sidewalk. His hands are dirty, right knee scraped where his overalls ripped. They’ll ask about that, he knows. He’ll say: I fell, it don’t hurt. At the corner, he wheels around onto Starr Avenue.